Scott Alexander

He argues that the reason most wives work these days isn't because we're poorer and they have to work to survive, but because we're richer, and so wives can make so much money working outside the home that the opportunity cost is too high to pass up.

a single earner could still support a family on a 1950s lifestyle.

It would just feel like a failure because we don't realise how much worse that 1950s lifestyle was compared to our current conditions.

The article's paywalled, but you can get a pretty good sense of the argument from these paragraphs.

After determining that the median man makes about $80,000 a year, he writes, quote, This means the 40th percentile rent for a home with any given set of characteristics.

They say FMR for a three-bedroom home in the Jacksonville area is $2,163.

That comes out to about 30% of Mr. Median's annual income.

Can you really get a place to live for that little?

Here's a lovely three-bedroom home in the East Arlington neighborhood for $2,020 a month, and it's zoned for an elementary school with a 10 out of 10 ranking from grade schools.

Link in post.

It's true that 1,617 square feet is on the small side for, say, a family of five in the contemporary United States, but the average size of a new single-family home was 1,289 square feet in 1960 and 1,500 square feet in 1970.

Two of your kids are going to need to share a bedroom, but that's how people lived back in the day.

There's more to life than housing, of course, but I started there because that's the largest item in a household budget.

Durable goods like furniture, cars, and appliances have all become better and more affordable since the mid-1960s.

That's partially offset by rising prices for things like college tuition, healthcare, and childcare.

But in the 1960s, most young people didn't go to college.

The way health insurance works, you only need one worker in your family to get a job-based health plan.

And of course, with your wife serving as a full-time homemaker, you don't need to worry about childcare expenses.

The big thing is that with a larger family, you literally have a bunch of mouths to feed.

but the model here is to replicate how people actually lived in the mid-1960s, which is that they dined out much less frequently and also spent a much larger share of their total income on food.